


hush little baby (don’t you cry)

by TheTinyTortoise



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Macbeth - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, F/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 15:57:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13861107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTinyTortoise/pseuds/TheTinyTortoise
Summary: No one had ever expected anything of her, no one but the long, serpentine shape perpetually pressed against the heartbeat in her throat.





	hush little baby (don’t you cry)

Alasdair sobs as Morag bars the door to the shrieks of her ladies-in-waiting outside. Her lip curls. He had never let her cry back when she’d been a girl and her tears hadn’t been dried up yet. And now he thinks he gets to, here at the end? She aims a kick his way.

Yet he still leaps into her arms and scrambles into his customary place at her neck, curled around her throat like a string of jewels. A glutton for punishment, the both of them, her mother had always croaked, wasted and drained by yet another child who wouldn’t live. Morag was the only one who’d lived to adulthood, and even that wasn’t much to celebrate. She was just a girl, and one who wasn’t even beautiful. No one had ever expected anything of her, no one but the long, serpentine shape perpetually pressed against the heartbeat in her throat.

“Don’t cry,” he’d whispered as her eyes burned and her cheeks went hot. “Don’t let them see. We’ll show them.”

And oh, how she’d wished Mother hadn’t been long dead with that last brat when she’d finally walked down the aisle with jewels in her ears and the lord’s babe in her belly. She’d wished Mother had been there to see, just like everyone else in that chapel who’d whispered and stared. Alasdair had been giddy with glee, scrambling down the long silk sleeve of her dress to bump noses with Macbeth’s gigantic bitch daemon. When Macbeth slipped the ring on her finger, Morag had known, without the shadow of a doubt, that she’d won.

But now she knows better. She hadn’t won a damn thing. And now she knows something else, too-it’s time to pay the piper for that stolen victory, and all of her other little sins since.

Alasdair’s little claws dig into her skin as she walks towards the window. She strokes his fur with a steady hand. She isn’t afraid, as long as they go together. Nothing has ever been able to stop her, not with him at her side.

“Morag, please,” he cries. “Don’t.”

She climbs up onto the sill and the wind whips at her tangled black hair. The ground below beckons.

“Don’t cry,” she parrots. “We’ll show them.”

Then she jumps

**Author's Note:**

> Alasdair is a mongoose. He looks something like this: https://www.africansky.com/img/img_hero/mammals/000-slender-mongoose.jpg
> 
> Moyna, Macbeth’s daemon, is a huge black wolf. My headcanon is that throughout the play she slowly becomes a mutt until Macbeth doesn’t even recognize her anymore.


End file.
